


Dandelion Seeds

by shsldespair



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland), Original Work
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, Apocalypse, Artistic Gore, Body Horror, Gen, Original Character(s), Original Universe, Pandemics, Science Fiction, Vivisection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:34:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27068716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shsldespair/pseuds/shsldespair
Summary: All her life, Eleanor has been afflicted with insatiable curiosity. She's always been willing to do whatever it took to follow it, knowing she would eventually find a time she'd go too far. This alien pandemic, terrifying and beautiful, may finally be that time.
Kudos: 4





	Dandelion Seeds

**Author's Note:**

> this is only annihilation fanfic in the loosest sense of the word. it was a writing exercise where i described a scene from the movie from memory in as much detail as i could manage then built a world around it. i'm calling it fanfic so i can justify posting it on ao3 instead of just letting it gather dust on my hard drive! just take it!
> 
> also i swear to god i wrote this pre-covid

The body, grown into the wall, is the most beautiful thing Eleanor has ever seen. Skin stretches, dry and papery, over what is left of his gaunt face, gazing upward in rapture, mouth open in a silent scream of ecstasy that will never end. The contagion has crept out of him like a visual replacement for his voice, growing out fractally along the wall. The pattern is reminiscent of the pathways of blood vessels, or a mature slime mold, or a river’s tributaries. Its soft, beautiful colors, pastel pinks and blues and yellows and greens melt into one another across the wall, a soft, fluffy canvas, the field of moss-like fungi. It looks like _life_ , and up against the hollowed out man, it makes you forget what you are supposed to pity and what you are supposed to be afraid of. It makes you forget that it has ripped his body apart.

A full ten feet blow, she finally finds his torso, identifiable by the tight, gauzy skin stretched over a ribcage. His abdomen is open, dried out-intestines and viscera hanging like vines. He is ghost-pale and with the fluffy white contagion growing around him, over him, spilling out of him, the boundary between him and the thing that overtook so impossible to find that they appear as one organism. Frankly, they may as well be. So profoundly parasitic is the contagion that once embedded, it becomes impossible to remove. So much of it is an unknown—what it is, where it comes from—but the finality of it is undeniable. By the time you feel the tickle in your throat, it is already too late.

Things had started subtly enough. People showed up in hospitals with respiratory distress. When doctors opened their mouths to shine lights down their throat, they could see fuzzy white tendrils growing up from the depths of them. Minute cameras came back covered in it. Eventually, inevitably, they would suffocate. She remembers watching the reporting on one of the first autopsies, how utterly _stuffed_ the body was with it. The news had been very delicate, of course, showing a CGI render of what they thought the contagion may look like, but she’d scoured forbidden corners of the internet until she finally found the real autopsy photos. He’d been beautiful too. Nothing as blindingly, breathtakingly beautiful as this, of course. He was a body on a slab, not one that had been spread across a wall like an exploding star, but there was something undeniably captivating about the aesthetics of the contagion.

Most likely, it comes from trees. Airborne, like a twisted, vicious pollen. It dusts the leaves lightly, like colorful snow in a children’s picture book about Christmas. It’s small enough to clog even the most miniscule of bronchioles, to pass through the thin membrane of the alveoli along with the oxygen, that’s how it gets in your blood, how the in worst of the bodies it crowds out the organs. That’s why one very rich, desperate heiress went into cardiac arrest while recovering from her lung transplant, her heart full of contagion. There is a procedure now: airtight quarantine, palliative care, _immediate_ cremation. There are some ideas on how to protect the healthy, but for the sick there is no cure.

Eleanor stands and approaches the body until she is too close to make out the individual pieces and sinks her fingers into it. Cool, with an odd slipperiness, like chemical snow. She pulls her fingers back and watches the way it slowly grows to refill the impressions left behind. She wipes her hands off on her pants, pointlessly trying to get rid of the fuzzy texture it leaves behind. This stuff sticks to you.

She’s seen enough. She writes detailed notes then gets up close with her camera, taking photos from every angle, documenting every turn and detail, every interaction between human and contagion. The memory card is popped out and clipped into her notebook. When her plan is seen through, she will want to leave something behind.

She leaves the room, opens the front door, and unzips the plastic barrier so she can exit. The entire place is supposed to be sealed away, a desperate attempt to keep the contagion in. Technically, by opening it, she’s exposed everyone to danger, but if it comes from the trees than what’s the point? Why try to lock it away when it’s living in the air, blowing in the wind? They’ve already failed, and she doesn’t care enough to humor them. She does pull her mask back over her face before crawling out from under the chain link fence surrounding the dead neighborhood, only because if she doesn’t she’ll get men in space suits kicking down her door to drag her to quarantine. If what they know of the contagion is true, every breath they take is one step closer to doom. She knows it and so does everyone else or they would’ve made it harder to sneak in there.

All her life, Eleanor has been plagued by the affliction of insatiable curiosity. As a small child, she devoured books at such a voracious pace that her parents begged her to slow down lest they all starve, having spent their grocery money at bookstores. When her classmates turned around in disgust at the sight of the dead and decaying rabbit someone had found at the edge of the schoolyard, she’d sprinted toward it, needing to know what it looked like. She listened to her parents argue through walls with a violence that frightened her, unable to intervene, paralyzed by the thought of cutting short a story before it ended. It was what fueled the paintings she used to do before research consumed her. The thick-laid oil paints exploded off the canvas in violent strokes of color and texture, more interested in playing off each other than representing much of anything. It was this furious, insatiable curiosity that’d propelled her through years of school, through two separate Masters, through every moment of sleep-deprived, underfunded research.

The doctors, understandably concerned with saving lives, burned all the bodies. But she wasn’t a doctor, she was a _researcher_. When she felt the tightness in her chest, she needed to know. No one knew what was going to happen to her, but it took time to raze the evacuated communities. While bureaucrats cut away at red tape, the bodies of those that died in their homes rotted. All it took was a hole in a chain link fence for her to find herself in front of the eviscerated remains of a dead man she’d never met. She’d suspected it, that it never stopped growing, that it burst out of your skin and kept growing, that it spread you out like a dissected frog and kept growing, but she’d needed to _know_. Now she did. She made her way back to her lab.

She knew. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She tried so, so hard to be satisfied by it, abandon the plan and go home, but of course she couldn’t. She’s going to die anyway. Might as well do it on her own terms, satisfying her voracious curiosity. It was almost sick, how far this compulsion had pushed her, how laughably surreal it is to be sitting here like this, kneeling naked in front of a mirror like a cult sacrifice in a bad horror movie. She doesn’t know if it’s the thick smell of gasoline or the fear that makes her woozy, but when she stares into her reflection’s eyes, she has to force out her breath. It falters and a deep, painful cough wracks her that has her spitting chunks of contagion onto the floor. That’s enough to quell the doubt.

She had collected three tools: a lighter, a candle, and a scalpel. A camera sits to the right of the mirror, recording video. First, she lights the candle and places it in front of her. Even if the amount of contagion she’ll be releasing into the air is miniscule compared to what’s already there, she doesn’t want her lab quarantined and her research destroyed when they find her. The gasoline puddle she sits in will burn hot and quick, like a dying star. It’ll have just enough destruction in it to destroy her body before the metal and linoleum of the lab starves the fire out.

The first patient to receive a heart catheter and the first doctor to perform the procedure were the same person. This life-saving procedure exists because a long time ago, scientist needed to know if it worked and no one was brave enough to try, so he did it on himself, fed a tube up his own wrist and into his heart. Eleanor often thought of that story, wondering what would finally push her to that extreme, be it brave or stupid. She had not expected auto-vivisection, but so be it.

She looks at the contagion on the floor, already growing and spreading in a small puddle of saliva. She looks at her gaunt body, wasting away. Before she can think any harder about this, she sinks the scalpel blade into her stomach and pulls upwards. The pain is blinding; she wishes she’d thought to stick something in her mouth. With nothing else, she bites down on her own arm and screams, letting her own flesh muffle the cry. The teeth sinking into her arm, the taste of blood and gasoline, it doesn’t register. There is _nothing_ now but this pain, all-encompassing, all-consuming, hungry and inescapable as the contagion inside her.

It’s funny, it almost makes her laugh, but in all the time she’s spent planning, she never actually considered how bad it would hurt. She knew it would, she isn’t stupid, but even her own expansive imagination couldn’t touch the visceral reality of what she’s done to herself. Some part of her revels in the totality of the sensation, severed from everything besides agony. It takes a long, _long_ moment of quivering in pain, of trying not to cry, of squeezing her eyes shut and seeing red-hot fireworks behind her eyes, before she’s able to force herself back to staring in the mirror. She has no choice but to continue. To die now, with nothing to show for herself but a slit in her belly would be a _waste_. She can’t have that.

Somehow, despite her shaking hands, she manages to pare back the skin of her chest until she can see the glistening white bone of her rib cage and underneath, two shiny pink lungs. She cannot help but be angry with them. How _dare_ they look so healthy, so shiny and plump, as if they’re not stuffed to bursting, choking her from the inside out? She catches herself. Anger is pointless, especially this anger. She can’t be angry with the contagion for growing any more than she can fault her lungs for breathing it in. They’re both working exactly as they were meant to. It’s a biological marvel she’s staring at, and for the briefest of seconds the wonder of it is stronger than the pain.

In any case, she can’t dissect her lungs without sawing through her sternum, and she doesn’t trust herself to stay conscious through that.

If it’s inhaled, it probably travels down the throat and into the digestive system as well as the respiratory. The individual particles are small enough to be absorbed into the blood along with nutrients, just like it does with oxygen. It can probably even pass the blood-brain barrier. It can all be explained, and maybe some other scientist has already seen it, but _she_ hasn’t. If it’s going to kill her, then she gets to fucking _watch_. She doesn’t know when she started crying, when she catches a glimpse of her face the mirror her clammy white skin is shiny with tears. Shakily, she reaches a hand inside the slice in her abdomen. She can’t get inside her skull any better than she can her rib cage, but she can get to her intestines just fine.

Her body is slick and hot like she imagines the inside of a womb must be. The pain is so blinding, so red hot now, so all-encompassing that she can almost divorce herself from it. She closes her hand around thick, rope-like intestines, feels her organs shift around her hand and against her abdominal cavity and pulls the through the slice, she _yanks_ them free of the confines of her dying body. She pulls as much entrail as she can manage and spreads it out in front of her, red rivers of guts crisscrossing along the flat, white canvas of her laboratory floor. Only it’s not all red, she notes. Some of it is pink and healthy, but every few feet there are white splotches of dead tissue, drained entirely of blood. Her hand shakes so violently she nearly keels over, but she reaches out to touch one of those areas. Tight. Feels thinner. Where the healthy stretches of gut range from somewhat collapsed to completely flaccid, the white bits feel like an overstuffed sausage.

She stares at the camera. “As I suspected, the contagion has lodged itself in my small intestine,” she says, voice straining with the effort not to pass out. “Sections of necrotic flesh. Early stages of what happened to the corpse.” She wheezes. “Have you seen the pictures? Beautiful.”

The days of her attending anatomy lectures covered in paint are long behind her. She set down her paintbrush for good years ago in reckless pursuit of knowledge, but beauty followed her. It settled in her lungs, in her gut, it’s tearing her apart. She runs the edge of the blade along her overstuffed guts. It bursts like a cattail, spewing pastel-colored fuzz into the air. She knows she must be delirious by now by the little voice in her head urging, _Make a wish!_ , as if she’s six years old and scattering dandelion seeds.

“They eat you alive, every part of you,” she says to the camera, “and they keep eating you after you’re dead.”

Her face is pale. She’s hunched over to one side. Her hands shake too badly to grip her blood-slick intestines anymore—they slip between her fingers like disobedient worms. There’s one more thing, though, one last thing she wants to see. She takes the hunting knife in her hand, rests it on top of one rib, and then slowly punctures the lung. The contagion pours out of it and takes root, spreading out in tendrils like a slime mold into a delicate, lace-like pattern across her lungs, her heart, her ribs, her exposed muscles. Nourished and warm inside her body, it grows fast enough that she can see it happen. _Beautiful_. She tries to lean a hand down on the ground for support, but her blood is like an oil slick on the linoleum and her arm gives out. She goes down hard and crumples into a pile of her own guts. Maybe she had a good reason for this at some point, thought she was martyring herself in pursuit of a cure, but she’s too far gone for the pretense of selflessness. She knelt down in front of a mirror with a scalpel in her hand because she needed to see death for herself and she recorded it so that someone would know just how far she was willing to go to do that.

Like oil and water, her blood never fully mixes with the pool of gasoline she lies in. The contagion floats atop the puddle, gliding along the surface as it grows. How fortunate for Eleanor, that the last thing she sees is something so beautiful. She has just enough energy to pick her hand up off the ground and push over the candle.


End file.
